Panic.  Chaos.  Disaster.

Well, not really, but some people did freak out.

The other day at work our Internet connection went out at around two-thirty in the afternoon, which is about three and a half hours before we closed.  Let me tell you, it was a long three hours.

At first, it didn’t seem like an issue.  Our internet has been funky for a few weeks now, going off at the most random times and immediately coming back on.  It happens so quick that you barely notice it unless you’re trying to go to a new web page while it’s out.  So when I tried to go onto the local news site and the page didn’t load, I didn’t fret… however, once it had been about ten minutes, patrons began to come up to me asking what was going on.  Then I knew we had an issue.

Long story short, we never got it back on that afternoon, so the library was ridiculously slow once people realized we had no Internet or WiFi available.  One guy was very upset about the ordeal, but unfortunately, there was nothing we could do.  We later on found out it was a city-wide issue with that particular Internet provider and nothing on our end, for once.

It was just a big wake-up call to how dependent our society is on the Internet and it makes me wonder… could anyone really live without it?